Weekly Wrap-Up 10/19-10/22/10

I’ve been using the term “core subjects” to refer to those activities relating to Math and Language Arts (spelling, phonics, reading, writing).   Which has left me wondering what to call the other subjects we (try) to do each week (Science, History, Art, Music, pretty much anything else except field trips – I know what to call those).  I decided I’m going to try to be consistent and call them electives (even though I don’t really consider them optional but it’s the best I can come up with right now).

We had a pretty good week for our core subjects this week but didn’t get to much with our electives.  (Is anyone keeping track of how often we DON’T get to everything – our core subjects, our electives and fun?  If so, I don’t want to know).

Georgie is still loving AAS but I think he’s getting a little bored with short a words.  We’ve been working on them for a very long time now, not because he wasn’t getting them, just because we spent most of last year just playing around with different things and every program seems to start with short a words.  I think he knows pretty much all the short vowel cvc words but we will continue doing our programs at a slightly faster pace just to make sure.   We finished up Step 5 and did Step 6 this week.   Step 6 was his first lesson with an actual spelling list of (of course) short a words.  He wanted to use the tiles to play a game where we switched around word endings and when I told him he had to wait until we finished our lesson, this was his response…

His first word –tap- with the tiles upside down and a mumbled “I'm not switching it”.   So, we put the tiles away and his first spelling list was done only on paper – what fun!  We start short i words next and hopefully he will find them more interesting.  I redid my great big file system to slightly accelerate our phonics and spelling.  Hopefully it will be enough since I am definitely not doing that again.

Math is going fine.  Sometimes it’s very easy for him, sometimes he has to think about it a little (I love MEP for this).  He was in a mood this week and it was hard once again to keep him following the directions.  MEP had a activity where he was supposed to write down the number of dots on each side of drawn dominos and put the correct sign (< > =) between them.  He didn’t like the dots MEP decided to use and instead did his own.  Wherever they had no dots (0) he decided to draw 3.  He still showed understanding of the concept so……

I’m still working on incorporating more of our games into our day.  This week we did a Domino Parking Lot.    I found this on Confessions of a Homeschooler but the actual worksheet is from Mathwire.com.   Georgie had a lot of fun doing this and was able to add the two sides together without noticably counting them. 

We also continued working on money this week.  We moved on to nickels.  Georgie did get a little confused with the difference between counting the number of the coins and counting the value of the coins.  

Vicki was very excited to see the money and used pennies to fill in one of her magnet pages.  This one was from Itsy Bitsy Printables.  (These sheets are among their free products).  She really enjoyed doing it this way so I may have to think about adding these to our rotation.  I think she might almost be ready for pompom magnets as well since she didn’t once try to put a penny in her mouth. 

Her other “official” activity of the week was gluing beans to a b.  She had a lot of fun with this.  As you can see from the picture, Vicki LOVES glue.   This sheet was from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

We finished up our week with a VERY busy Saturday.  Georgie had a soccer game in the morning and then it was off to the Homecoming Game to cheer on our home team (and our cheerleader).  

We won, of course.